4. Frequently Asked Questions

The problem is, as usual, Windows. There is no dlfcn.h header on Windows,and there is no dlopen API. There is a similar API around the LoadLibrary function, and most of what is written here applies to it, too. Alternatively, you can use libltdl (included in libtool) to "emulate" dlopen on a variety of platforms.

You should also read section 4, "Dynamically Loaded (DL) Libraries", of the Program Library HOWTO for more techniques to load libraries and create classes independently of your platform.

I don't know of any, and I don't think there'll ever be one supporting all of dlopen's options.

There are alternatives though: libtltdl (a part of libtool), which wraps a variety of different dynamic loading APIs, among others dlopen and LoadLibrary. Another one is the Dynamic Module Loading functionality of GLib. You can use one of these to ensure better possible cross-platform compatibility. I've never used any of them, so I can't tell you how stable they are and whether they really work.